have we lost our connection?

When I was learning about evolution in my high school biology class someone posed an interesting question. Have humans stopped evolving because we no longer need to change to fit our environment? This is a thought that reenters my mind at times and I find it to be a valid question. Due to current technology we no longer have a need to adapt to fit our environment, in fact we do exactly the opposite, we change our environment to suit our needs. If the weather were to begin to get drastically colder, there’s no need for our bodies to evolve and start growing fur again to keep us warm, we can simply put on a synthetic jacket if we need to go outside. Otherwise we can sit in our heated houses by the gas fireplace or if we absolutely must go somewhere we can start our cars and let them run for a while to warm up while we wait in the warmth inside. We no longer need to adapt to the changing of the weather and we don’t have to adapt to find food either since we now control our food sources. We plant the crops we need and if there may be a problem with them, science has come up with some chemical we can spray on them to ensure their survival through almost any condition. Same with meat sources, no need to worry about those running out when we can keep thousands of cows stacked upon one another without having to worry about disease because there are plenty of antibiotics to take care of that. It seems like we’ve finally done it, we’ve beaten nature and no longer need to adapt to fit in with nature, we can create our own environment that is much more stable and dependable…But is that really what we want to do? Have we completely lost touch with nature? In a lecture the other day my professor was talking about the hurricane in South East Asia in the 90s that caused a huge tidal wave. He talked about how relatively few animals and indigenous people were harmed, yet thousands of other people died. The indigenous people who still rely heavily on nature for their survival knew how to read the signs that nature was sending and knew they needed to get to higher ground. They also saw that the animals were acting strangely, another sign of trouble. The animals seem to be the most in touch with nature, they can sense shifts in things like atmospheric pressure and know when it’s time to take action in one form or another. On the Titanic people in the lower decks knew which direction to run from the water because it was the direction the rats were running purely on animal instinct. We have these notions that we are a highly sophisticated and advanced society, yet it is the “primitive” indigenous people and animals that have maintained a connection with nature. They seem to have an alliance with nature rather than trying to conquer it. Where would we be without our watches and our weather forecasts and our air conditioning? We have the technology to do all these amazing things, to try and predict tsunamis, earthquakes, blizzards…but what happens if this technology fails us? Think about a power outage, think about the blackouts that happened in New York City that shut down a city and caused massive chaos. Have we lost every natural instinct? Are we connected with the natural environment at all anymore? Or have we become so sure of ourselves and our new ideas in this technological revolution that we’ve lost any connection with mother earth that we once had? While it may seem more advanced to keep all our records electronically rather than carving them into stone, isn’t it a lot easier to erase a hard drive than to wipe clean a carving? These are just some questions I’ve been thinking about lately, unfortunately I don’t have any answers but sometimes it scares me to think how disconnected from the earth we have become and I’m left wondering if we have any chance of reestablishing that connection before it is lost forever.